by Daniel Hathaway
Most people who work multiple jobs have to factor commuting time into their schedules, but Apollo’s Fire concertmaster Alan Choo, recently also appointed assistant artistic director of the ensemble, doesn’t reckon his travel in hours. Home is in Singapore, where Choo founded Red Dot Baroque in 2018, and that’s 9,465 air miles from Cleveland.
Choo is in town for a few weeks this time to be featured in Apollo’s Fire’s “Muse of Fire” programs that begin on Thursday, February 2, in Akron and end on Sunday, February 5 in Rocky River, with two nights at St. Paul’s in Cleveland Heights in between.
His main assignment is the solo violin role in two of 17th-century Bohemian composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Rosary Sonatas — musical meditations on the five Joyful Mysteries, the five Sorrowful Mysteries, and the five Glorious Mysteries of the life of Christ.
Probably written in the 1670s, but unknown to modern ears until first published in 1905, the devotional work is preserved in a beautiful manuscript held in the Bavarian State Library. [Read more…]
On a recent chilly Sunday in Cleveland Heights, waves of sleet skittered down from the heavens, ricocheting off anything that stood in their way. But the real storm was brewing inside St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Apollo’s Fire and director Jeannette Sorrell took the stage for their latest program. “Storms and Tempests” entertained a packed house on November 13, as the Baroque orchestra played up the drama of both nature and love.
Apollo’s Fire can’t help returning to the music of Claudio Monteverdi. Cleveland’s period orchestra revived its thrilling take on the composer’s 
It’s fun and illuminating to trace outside influences on composers’ changing styles as they make their way through life, standing on the shoulders of their predecessors to see a clearer view of the future.
At the top of their program at the Cleveland Museum of Art on Sunday afternoon, October 24, Apollo’s Fire founder and artistic director Jeannette Sorrell told the full house that the Baroque orchestra was opening its 30th season with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons rediscovered, returning to a piece that the ensemble has featured every year since 1991.
Apollo’s Fire is making the most of the summer. Cleveland’s Baroque Orchestra is easing audiences back into live performances this month with a program, “Bach, Vivaldi, and Friends,” that satisfies all musical expectations. The group followed up a terrific first concert on Saturday, July 10, at the Avon Lake United Church of Christ with two more local performances and one on tour at Tanglewood.
A virtuoso is a highly skilled performer, and a virtuoso performance is one that astonishes the audience by its feats. In ancient Greece the cities would hold male competitions in acrobatics, conjuring, public reciting, blowing the trumpet, and acting out scenes from Homer’s epics, the winners of which would have been praised as virtuous, or “full of manly virtues.” —
With each of its themed programs, Apollo’s Fire is becoming more than just a period instrument ensemble that gives concerts. Its March program, “Tapestry — Jewish Ghettos of Baroque Italy,” which replaces performances of Handel’s Israel in Egypt, finds Jeannette Sorrell and her colleagues moving seamlessly out of their usual roles to morph into singing actors and dancers, all in order to bring the subject at hand to vibrant life.